Age UK
It’s always interesting to read exactly who’s teaming up with whom, and who benefits. We’ve looked over the past few weeks at the Telegraph and its involvement with Swinton and the St James’ Place Partnership, neither offering even a remotely good deal for anyone seeking independent, whole market advice.
Now we have another arrangement to look at to decide just how it benefits the consumer. Let’s look at the parties involved:
Age UK
Age UK is an amalgamation of two high profile consumer groups: Age Concern and Help the Aged. On that basis it would be fair to say that their pedigree is lengthy and well recognised. Consumers of a certain age have turned to both of the previous groups for essential and unbiased information as they’ve approached retirement and beyond.
Premier Retirement Services
Premier Retirement Services is part of JLT Benefit solutions Ltd, one of the UK’s largest employee benefits providers. It provides pension administration and advisory services to companies and individuals throughout the UK.
Now, through the Age UK Annuity Service customers can access the services of Premier Retirement Services when choosing an annuity to provide an income in retirement. And because you expect nothing but the best from an organisation like Age UK you know you’re in safe hands – right?
Your journey starts with clicking a button on the Age UK website and filling in some basic details. There’s a downloadable 23 page guide to annuities, which frankly can be very confusing to anyone who doesn’t work in the industry, and having clicked everything that needs to be clicked, an annual pension figure, based upon the amount of pension fund you entered on the website, will appear onscreen. Instructions for how to proceed are emailed to you, and you’ll be kept up to date on the progress of your annuity purchase throughout.
HOWEVER… here’s an excerpt from their Key Facts document describing their service:
“No advice – You will not receive advice or a recommendation from us. We may ask some questions to narrow down the selection of products that we will provide details on. You will then need to make your own choice about how to proceed.”
In addition, your choices will be severely limited to a panel of providers decided upon by Premier Retirement Services, and will not include the whole of the market.
Sadly, you probably feel that by not offering an independent choice for you, the consumer, Age UK has let you down.
Whatever decision you make, based upon the ingestion of a 23 page industry-specific document, is yours for life. Once an annuity is purchased it cannot be sold back or refunded.
At Jones Hill we strongly feel that ALL advice should be independent. We will ask you every question necessary to get to a solution for you. More importantly, we will listen to you during the process, something no website can do. Finally, we will choose an annuity (if that were the right thing to do, and it may well not be!) from the WHOLE of the available options, not just a small sample.
And if it helps, you won’t pay a penny more for the advice. Proper job.
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